PARENTS OF children as young as seven have contacted the Eating Disorder Resource Centre in recent months with concerns about their children's relationship with food.
Suzanne Horgan, director of the centre in Wexford, says parents are increasingly facing scenarios where children are obsessed about food, the shape of their bodies or their weight.
"Some want to stop eating to stay the size they are. Others are complaining about their clothes being too tight for them and wanting to eat less," she says. "In the past 12 months I have had six phone calls from parents of children as young as seven and nine with concerns about their children's preoccupation with food, body or weight.
"What do you do when your child says she or he hates the way they look and feels the only way to change it is to starve?"
It has been estimated that more than 200,000 people in Ireland have eating disorders but Horgan believes the number is much higher than that. "Many go unreported due to the shame and stigma attached to having an eating disorder."
Trying to identify if a child has an eating disorder is not an easy task, according to Janine O'Gorman (19) from Wexford. O'Gorman concealed anorexia and bulimia from her family before getting help from the Eating Disorder Resource Centre.
"Parents are told to see if their teenagers are dieting, or if they are moody or hate the way they look, but that could describe a lot of teenagers," she says.
O'Gorman was almost 13 when she went on her first diet after becoming conscious of her body and noticing that she had some puppy fat. "I found that I was good at dieting," she says. "I was very good at cutting out foods and I seemed to lose the weight easily."
On hearing that the average woman needed 67 grams of fat a day, she began whittling her fat intake down to 50g, then 30g and finally considered it a good day if she took less than 10g.
Looking back now, she sees that dieting made her feel that she had some control over her life. Her parents separated when she was seven, and she was living in England with her father. Her gradual weight loss wasn't noticed by people who saw her every day but when she visited her mother in Ireland for a mid-term break, her mother noticed how thin she was. "But I was tall for my age and I was growing so you could put it down to that. I didn't realise what I was doing myself."
O'Gorman was unhappy in England so when she moved back to Ireland with her grandmother, her eating behaviour improved. However, when she became unhappy again, her conflict with food resurfaced.
She ate a large helping of cake one day and got sick afterwards. "I remembered that Gemma Atkinson's character in Hollyoaks [ a teenage soap opera] was bulimic and I thought this was the magic solution. I could eat and get sick and not put on weight," she recalls.
She continued to diet, often surviving on an apple during the day and then bingeing and purging at night. "I would eat everything I liked because I knew I was going to make myself sick anyway."
O'Gorman lived beside her school in Wexford but some mornings she was so weak that she struggled to drag herself up the road to school.
It was the thought of her father coming home to stay for a week that finally made O'Gorman admit her problem. She had started smoking and she realised that, while she could hide her eating disorder and her cigarette habit from her grandmother, she would not be able to trick her father for a whole week.
O'Gorman told her parents about her eating problems and they brought her to a GP who found that she was significantly undernourished. However, no lasting damage had been done to her organs. After receiving help from the Eating Disorder Resource Centre, she is now training to be a counsellor for people with eating disorders.
Her decision to go on that first diet was sparked by seeing relatives on diets and exercising to lose weight. She stresses the importance of sending the right message to children, saying that if children are constantly listening to their parents talking about dieting and being fat, then this behaviour seems normal.
She refers to a five-year-old acquaintance whose mother watched her skipping one day and was then shocked to see her jumping on a weighing scales to see if she had lost weight.
O'Gorman advises parents who may be concerned about a child's eating habits to observe the child's relationship with food and exercise. "Do they panic if they miss exercise, or if they can't get to a bathroom after a meal? Are they obsessed about dieting and exercise, or will they have a bar of chocolate?" she asks.
